Rhon­dor Dowlat

The Mi­na­ma­ta Con­ven­tion has not yet been rat­i­fied in T&T, how­ev­er, steps are be­ing tak­en for a project called the De­vel­op­ment of a Mi­na­ma­ta Ini­tial As­sess­ment (MIA) in the Caribbean.

Yes­ter­day, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from sev­er­al re­gion­al gov­ern­ments and lo­cal or­gan­i­sa­tions at­tend­ed and par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Re­gion­al Lessons Learned Work­shop at the Hy­att Re­gency, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.

The work­shop was host­ed by The Basel Con­ven­tion Re­gion­al Cen­tre for Train­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy Trans­fer for the Caribbean Re­gion (BCRC-Caribbean).

The MIA project com­menced in Au­gust 2016 and is said to be in its fi­nal stages, with an ex­pect­ed com­ple­tion date of Sep­tem­ber 2018.

The project is fund­ed by the Glob­al En­vi­ro­ment Fa­cil­i­ty (GEF) with tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance pro­vid­ed by the Unit­ed Na­tions En­vi­ron­ment (UN En­vi­ron­ment)—the im­ple­ment­ing agency.

The project aims to as­sist Ja­maica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lu­cia and T&T with es­tab­lish­ing a na­tion­al foun­da­tion to un­der­take fu­ture work to­wards the rat­i­fi­ca­tion and im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Mi­na­ma­ta Con­ven­tion on Mer­cury which is a glob­al treaty un­der the UN En­vi­ron­ment that aims to pro­tect hu­man health and the en­vi­ron­ment from the neg­a­tive im­pacts of mer­cury.

Ac­cord­ing to a Mer­cury Re­lease In­ven­to­ry, Waste Stor­age and Dis­pos­al in T&T that was re­leased in De­cem­ber 2016, T&T’s mer­cury emis­sions have not been mon­i­tored in some cas­es but from the pre­lim­i­nary find­ings of the in­ven­to­ry, mer­cury emis­sions can po­ten­tial­ly have a no­table im­pact on world­wide emis­sions.

The in­ven­to­ry found that the ma­jor sources of mer­cury, in terms of es­ti­mat­ed to­tal re­leas­es, in

T&T were: Use and dis­pos­al of oth­er prod­ucts (309 kg Hg/y); oil and gas pro­duc­tion (170 kg Hg/y)

And oth­er ma­te­ri­als pro­duc­tion (ce­ment pro­duc­tion) (109 kg Hg/y).

Per­ma­nent sec­re­tary at the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Joanne De­o­raj and Lu­dovic Bernau­dat, pro­gramme of­fi­cer, UN En­vi­ron­ment—DTIE (Chem­i­cals and Waste Branch) both de­liv­ered open­ing re­marks at the com­mence­ment of the work­shop.